Over the past few days the world of cosmology and astrophysics has gone “supernova.” Researchers affiliated with the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica announced that they had discovered empirical evidence for a key part of the Big Bang theory, cosmic inflation. One aspect of this discovery that I found really interesting is that it forms an almost perfect parallel to a discovery...

Since it’s release last November, Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists has quickly become one of the most popular new books on atheism (as of now it has 200 reviews on amazon.com). As someone who has also recently written a book on atheism, though from a far different perspective, I was eager to see Boghossian’s method for “creating an atheist.” In this book review I’ll cover the good, the bad, and the ugly in...

Last week Governor Jan Brewer vetoed Arizona Senate Bill 1062 after a national backlash that described the legislation as being “anti-gay.” The bill would have allowed Arizona businesses to refuse, on religious grounds, to offer their services to anyone who did not belong to a particular “protected class” (e.g., race, ethnicity, sex, religious groups, etc.).[i] Since Arizona state law...

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on same-sex marriage at a university in the Midwest. My goal was to provide the audience with the non-religious reasons behind the Church’s efforts to keep marriage from being redefined in order to accommodate same-sex couples. Throughout the presentation I took great pains to be charitable. I also exhorted Catholics to not let their opposition to same-sex marriage turn into mean-spirited attitudes towards people who identify as having same-sex...

On Tuesday night the Kentucky-based Creation Museum hosted a debate on origins that over 500,000 people watched on the Internet. CNN”s Tom Foreman served as the debate moderator. Although there have been lots of creation/evolution debates in the past, this one generated extra excitement because of the high-profile status of the debaters.

"No work of charity should be regarded as foreign to the Society, although its special object is to visit poor families."

~ In outlining the activities of The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, an international association of Catholic laymen engaging systematically in personal service to the poor, the founders had an eye to the future needs of human kind.